Clockwork Secrets

by Dru Pagliassotti

  “Wait here.” Taya crossed the deck and pulled out another rescue harness, carrying it and a weight belt back to Liliana. “Put these on.”

  Liliana’s hands shook as she buckled the harness and fastened the belt around her waist. They worked to the sound of receding gunfire.

  “Don’t take off the belt,” Taya warned, yanking on the harness. It had been counterweighted for an adult lictor, not a slight sixteen-year-old girl. If Liliana removed the belt, she’d be blown away in a gust of wind. “This will keep you safe if you go overboard.”

  Jinian returned.

  “I’m going below to help Lieutenant Imbrex,” Taya told her.

  “Go,” Jinian said, dropping a hand on Liliana’s shoulder. “We are safe.”

  Taya smelled smoke as she climbed down the ladder to the gunnery deck.

  “Lieutenant Imbrex? Professor Dautry?”

  Two lictors were trying to put out a fire by one of the cannon, scooping water from the ballast tank into a bucket and running across the deck to douse the flames. As Taya’s boots hit the deck, she saw Lieutenant Imbrex and Professor Dautry heaving a cannon through the open firing bay. It tilted and dropped out of sight.

  Two lictors— less than half of the gunnery crew. Taya wondered where the other three had gone. She glanced fearfully at the open bay.

  “What can I do?” she asked, dragging her eyes away from the empty sky. Imbrex pointed to the steam cannon, now silent.

  “Cut the ropes and heave it overboard,” she ordered. “Watch the barrel— it’s hot.”

  “Oh, the captain’s going to hate that,” Dautry said.

  “He can dock the replacement cost from my slagging salary,” Imbrex growled, shoving a case of shot overboard. “Assuming any of us live to pick up our next paycheck.”

  Taya looked around for something to use on the thick cables and remembered the hatchet she’d dropped one deck above. She had picked it up and was heading back down when the ship jolted again. A second later something exploded overhead. The cries and screams made Taya change her mind and scramble to the top deck, her heart in her mouth as she searched for her husband.

  Cristof was kneeling on the deck, turning over a fallen lictor. Black, oily black smoke rolled from the ship’s engine. Taya hesitated, torn. She wanted to help Cristof, but if the engine was dying, they needed to jettison all the excess weight they could.

  She searched the deck, saw that Jinian and Liliana were all right, and raced back down to gunnery.

  “The engine’s been damaged,” she shouted.

  “Throw all the cannon and shot over,” Imbrex ordered, spinning and heading up the ladder. The fire had been put out, so Taya started using her hatchet on the cables while the other crew members discarded the shot. They were shoving the giant steam cannon overboard when Lieutenant Imbrex came flying back down the ladder.

  “Rifles and ammo to deck,” she ordered. “Ship at seven o’clock low!”

  Taya instinctively reached for the steam cannon’s cables, but it was too late. The giant weapon was gone.

  * * *

  The sound of gunfire was deafening as Taya hurried across the deck with the last box of volley-gun ammunition. She dropped the crate next to Liliana and Jinian and fell to one knee, gasping for breath.

  The Firebrand was in full, careening retreat, riding the wind and losing altitude as the ship behind it picked it to pieces with cannonfire. Groans and cries filled the air. The lictor who doubled as ship’s physician was gone — he’d been one of the gunnery crew lost overboard — and everyone else was too busy trying to save the Firebrand to tend to the wounded. Blood ran through the etched spiral grooves in the ondium plates that covered the deck, spilling over the edges each time the broken ornithopter jerked and heaved under another attack.

  Blood also soaked the sleeve of Jinian’s bright yellow Cabisi jacket, but she continued firing the volley gun with narrowed eyes and grit teeth, and Liliana stayed by her side, reloading, any remaining loyalty to her countrymen forgotten in the mindless fight for survival. Taya left them to it and scuttled down the deck to Cristof, who knelt at the stern rail firing his rifle side-by-side with Captain Amcathra and Professor Dautry. The pursuing dirigible was close enough now for Taya to read its name and number: the Formidable, Number Nine, holding at a dangerous seven o’clock low and blasting away at the Firebrand’s damaged stern.

  Abruptly Captain Amcathra rose, slinging his rifle over his shoulder and bellowing, “Prepare to evacuate!”

  So, the time had come at last. Taya grimly dug into her pocket for her armature keys.

  “Cris, I’m going—”

  A round hit the deck next to her and threw her off her feet. Jagged pieces of wood and metal filled the air and pierced her clothing. Taya felt herself sliding, and suddenly there was nothing at all beneath her legs.

  “Taya!”

  Half-blinded by the blood in her eyes, she reached for Cristof as she dangled from the wreckage that was all that was left of the ornithopter’s stern. Their hands clasped, jerking Cristof toward her. He was spread-eagled on the deck, but his ondium harness made him too light to anchor her. She gave an involuntary shriek as her hips dropped over the edge.

  “Taya, hold on!” Cristof’s fingers tightened, but Taya felt her hand slipping, blood and sweat working their treacherous way on their mutual grip. He gave her a panicked look.

  Then Captain Amcathra threw himself over Cristof’s back and closed a fist around the exalted’s rescue harness strap. Like the two of them, his face and pale blond hair was streaked with blood from exploding metal and wood. “I have you, Exalted.”

  “Come on, Taya, you can do it.” Cristof stretched out his other hand, trusting his friend to secure him. Taya lunged. Her fingers touched his and slid past. Their eyes met in a moment of crystal-clear comprehension.

  She was going to fall.

  “Taya! Taya, no!” Liliana shouted.

  Taya’s stomach had slid over the edge and her hand was slipping from Cristof’s grip. Horror filled his gray eyes as their fingers began to part. She lunged again with her free hand. This time her fingers closed around his thin wrist just as their clasped hands slid apart. Taya gasped as she dropped, dangling in midair with only their mutual grip to support her. Bullets from the Alzanans’ guns pinged on the broken wood and rang off the bent ondium plates around her. She looked up. Cristof was half-over the shattered deck himself, his long, soot-stained fingers plucking at her sleeve for a grip while Amcathra strained to keep him in place.

  “Janos, let me go! She’s falling!”

  “Taya!” Liliana knelt on the edge of the broken deck, her long hair whipping around her and her fingers working at the buckles on her rescue harness. “Don’t let go!”

  “Principessa, be careful!” Amcathra snapped. “Kattaka, grab her!”

  Taya’s blood-covered fingers slipped down Cristof’s wrist. She looked up and fought for a smile to make him feel better.

  Falling to death wasn’t such an unusual fate for an icarus. She hoped she’d meet him again in her next life.

  “No!” Cristof roared, twisting fiercely against Amcathra’s iron grip.

  Liliana yanked off her harness and swung it downward as Taya’s fingers slipped over Cristof’s wrist. The harness’s flying straps and loose buckles struck her face and she instinctively grabbed it.

  The Firebrand hurtled away in a trail of smoke and debris. Taya’s hands tightened around the floating ondium harness, her heart battering her ribs. For a moment she saw Cristof’s pale face and heard his despairing shout, and then the Formidable was thundering beneath her, its guns continuing to pound the hapless ornithopter to pieces.

  Sobbing, Taya thrust an arm through one of the harness straps, watching as the two ships vanished around an angle of the mountain pass. The sound of their engines and gunfire gradually faded into the distan
ce.

  For a few minutes she simply floated, bobbing a little, pushed by the wind. She was suspended almost a thousand feet over the forest that carpeted the mountain pass and almost equally as far horizontally from the nearest mountainside on her left.

  After what had seemed like hours of weapons fire, engine roar, and shouting, the mountains’ silence was almost frightening.

  At last, slowly, she began to discern the smaller noises around her— her own ragged breathing, the wind shushing through the trees, a hawk’s plaintive cry.

  No crash. Not yet.

  She took a deep, shuddering breath.

  “Lady, keep them safe,” she whispered. Her voice sounded small and lonely in the vast, empty space around her.

  After taking another minute to gather her strength, she pulled herself up and into the harness, her midair gymnastics causing her to spin and wobble. Finally she secured the latches around her chest and waist, cinching them as tightly as possible.

  She was floating, but she was helpless without her wings. The wind would probably blow her toward the mountainside, but that could take hours, maybe even days. She pulled out the pocketwatch Cristof had made her, cradling it with both hands.

  3:30 p.m. She closed it and thrust it deep into her pocket for safety. She reached into her other pocket and felt her armature keys.

  No food, no water, no matches, no compass— nothing to protect her from the cold of a mountain pass on a winter’s night.

  “I never learn,” she said ruefully.

  She listened again, wondering what had happened to the Firebrand and when the Formidable would return.

  Only a few more hours until nightfall. If she didn’t want to be blown into sharp rocks or tall pines in the dark, she’d have to descend.

  She reached into one of the harness pockets and pulled out a small bar of ondium. The silver metal tugged upward in her hand. The tiny object was worth a year of her salary, at least.

  With the greatest reluctance, she let it go. It flew up into the air and she sank.

  She’d released two-thirds of the precious ondium bars before her feet brushed the tops of the tall pines. She curled and spun around in midair, pulling herself down into the prickly branches, her eyes closed and her face tucked into her chest.

  At last she righted herself, wrapping her legs around a thick branch and leaning against the tree trunk. She ran her hands over her face. Dried blood crumbled under her fingers and scratches ached as they threatened to re-open. She probed a gash along the side of her face that felt larger and more painful than the others and wished she had a mirror.

  Her blood-spotted clothes had been torn ragged by flying wood and metal. None of the scratches on her body seemed too bad, although she’d be black and blue for a while. One of the gouges along the top of her left leg could have used a bandage. She peeled up her pants, tearing scabs, and let the fresh blood seep.

  A distant shout carried through the forest. She froze, holding her breath. Voices called back and forth in the distance.

  Alzanan soldiers.

  She looked up. Her descent had taken about twenty minutes, and although it was shady between the trees, night was still several hours away. She pulled her borrowed lictor’s jacket closed over her brightly patterned blue-and-white Cabisi shirt and rummaged through her pockets one more time.

  She wasn’t carrying any identification— her papers had been left behind in the Alzanan palace. She unfastened the gold icarus pin from the front of her jacket, hesitated, and pinned it to the inside cuff of her trousers, rolling her pants back down to her boots. She jammed her armature keys and pocketwatch into one of her boots between her sock and the leather.

  Her trousers weren’t remarkable, but her uniform jacket was obviously Ondinium. She could take it off, but she was reluctant to lose what little protection it offered against the winter chill. She wriggled out of the rescue harness.

  Let it go or buckle it to a tree branch? She was loathe to lose more of the precious metal, but if the Alzanans found it, she’d be breaking yet another of Ondinium’s strict prohibitions— the prohibition against letting ondium fall into the hands of foreigners.

  With a groan, she opened her hands before she could talk herself out of it. The harness shot upward through the narrow tree branches and into the sky.

  More shouts. Somebody had seen it.

  Taya yelped as the branch she was sitting on suddenly bent under her weight. She scrambled down to a stronger branch, hugging the tree trunk with both arms. The soldiers drew nearer, shouting directions to each other in Alzanan.

  “There! You, come down here!”

  Taya peered around the trunk. A blue-coated soldier pointed a rifle at her as others ran forward.

  “Please, don’t shoot!” she cried out in Mareaux. “Do you speak Mareaux?” It was a gamble, but with luck the Alzanans wouldn’t detect an Ondinium accent in another language. With her auburn hair and light skin, she could pass as Mareaux, and the soldiers might be reluctant to hurt a citizen from an allied country.

  “She’s Mareaux,” one of the soldiers told the rest. He shouted up in the same language. “You, come down here!”

  “Yes, yes, I’m coming.” Taya awkwardly descended, slipping and scraping against the trunk and clutching at branches. At last her boots hit the forest floor and she straightened, holding her hands in front of her in a placating gesture.

  “Turn around and keep your hands up,” one of the soldiers ordered.

  With deep misgivings, Taya turned toward the tree, raising her hands. A soldier grabbed her arms, twisting them behind her back and tying them. Then he spun her around again, throwing her back against the tree trunk.

  “Who are you?”

  “Tatienne Gifford,” she lied, then gave them her best worried, fawning smile. “Tatia, sir.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I was on the ship….” she let herself cringe as they stiffened, glaring at her. “The flying ship, they made me go with them. The Ondiniums— they kidnapped me from Os Cansai.”

  “Os Cansai? Where’s that?”

  “In Cabiel?” She let herself sound frightened and uncertain, which wasn’t hard. “I was studying Cabisi religious practices…. The Ondinium’s ornithopter came and fought an Alzanan dirigible….”

  Murmurs and exchanged looks. They had heard about the duel, then.

  “Why did they take you?”

  Taya fought for tears. She needed tears. She thought about Jayce and the rest of their staff, some executed, others still in prison. She conjured up her husband’s expression as she lost her grip on his wrist. She imagined him dead in a terrible crash.

  The last did it. She squeezed her eyes shut as tears ran down her face. They threatened to become uncontrollable. She fought to banish the horrible, all too easily conjured image of a battered and broken Cristof and concentrated on her story.

  “They wanted to go through Mareaux— they needed to get to Ondinium.” She drew a shaking breath, wiping her cheeks on her shoulders. “They grabbed me and told me I had to guide them. What could I do? They were soldiers, lictors, with guns and those horrid black stripes on their faces….”

  More murmurs, angrier this time.

  “How did you get off the ship, then?” The speaker looked unconvinced.

  Taya steadied herself. Pretending to cry had affected her more than she’d expected. The tears threatened to release a deep well of pent-up grief and fear that she couldn’t afford right now.

  “They— they have rescue harnesses that float. I saw them being used, so when the ship was hit and nobody was looking, I grabbed one and jumped. I— I— the ship was being blown to pieces and I didn’t want to die.”

  “That’s what we saw,” a soldier muttered in Alzanan. “The harness must have had ondium in it.”

  The others nodded. Her interrogat
or jerked his head and two soldiers fell back with him, conferring in low tones. Taya slumped against the tree trunk, not needing to pretend to look exhausted and fearful.

  “Those clothes you’re wearing—?” one asked.

  “They didn’t give me any time to pack. When they forced me on board, I was wearing this shirt, and a skirt and sandals.”

  Back to the murmured conference.

  “Please,” she ventured. “I’ll tell you everything I know about the ship. Please don’t shoot me. I just want to go home to Echelles.”

  The leader seemed to reach a decision.

  “We’re not going to shoot you— not yet, anyway.” He raised his rifle and slung it over his shoulder. The rest of the soldiers relaxed, putting their weapons away. “I’ll take you back to the main camp and let the captain decide what to do with you.”

  “Thank you,” Taya said in a deliberately small voice. She caught herself starting to bow and turned the movement into a shifting of her weight. The Alzanans, like the Mareaux, reserved bows for men and curtseys for women. Be careful, she warned herself.

  This wasn’t going to be easy, but as long as she was alive, she had some hope of seeing Cristof again. She prayed he’d gotten off the Firebrand alive.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The soldiers started up through the pass that evening toward the Ondinium border. Their progress was slow and Taya found the climb especially difficult with her hands tied behind her back and hidden objects digging into her ankles. That night, after she’d been allowed a small bowl of soup and some water, they bound her hands together again and tied her ankle to an iron stake driven deep into the ground inside their tent. Taya barely slept, surrounded by enemies, but none of them bothered her.

  The trip took three days. On the second day, they passed a long train of riders and wagons hauling more mortars up higher into the pass. The soldiers lingered for some time trading stories about fighting the Firebrand as it had passed overhead and cursing the Ondinium “invaders.” Taya pretended not to understand as she strained to hear. Nothing was said about a crash— if the Firebrand had been driven down, it had happened elsewhere.